Famous Americans of Recent Times eBook

Looking merely to the public career of Calhoun, the
special pleader of the Southern aristocracy, we should
expect to find him born and reared among the planters
of the low country. The Calhouns, on the contrary,
were up-country people,—­farmers, Whigs,
Presbyterians, men of moderate means, who wielded
the axe and held the plough with their own hands,
until enabled to buy a few “new negroes,”
cheap and savage; called new, because fresh from Africa.
A family party of them (parents, four sons, and a
daughter) emigrated from the North of Ireland early
in the last century, and settled first in Pennsylvania;
then removed to Western Virginia; whence the defeat
of Braddock, in 1755, drove them southward, and they
found a permanent abode in the extreme west of South
Carolina, then an unbroken wilderness. Of those
four sons, Patrick Calhoun, the father of the Nullifier,
was the youngest. He was six years old when the
family left Ireland; twenty-nine, when they planted
the “Calhoun Settlement” in Abbeville
District, South Carolina.

Patrick Calhoun was a strong-headed, wrong-headed,
very brave, honest, ignorant man. His whole life,
almost, was a battle. When the Calhouns had been
but five years in their forest home, the Cherokees
attacked the settlement, destroyed it utterly, killed
one half the men, and drove the rest to the lower
country; whence they dared not return till the peace
of 1763. Patrick Calhoun was elected to command
the mounted rangers raised to protect the frontiers,
a duty heroically performed by him. After the
peace, the settlement enjoyed several years of tranquillity,
during which Patrick Calhoun was married to Martha
Caldwell, a native of Virginia, but the daughter of
an Irish Presbyterian emigrant. During this peaceful
interval, all the family prospered with the settlement
which bore its name; and Patrick, who in his childhood
had only learned to read and write, availed himself
of such leisure as he had to increase his knowledge.
Besides reading the books within his reach, which
were few, he learned to survey land, and practised
that vocation to advantage. He was especially
fond of reading history to gather new proofs of the
soundness of his political opinions, which were Whig
to the uttermost. The war of the Revolution broke
in upon the settlement, at length, and made deadly
havoc there; for it was warred upon by three foes
at once,—­the British, the Tories, and the
Cherokees. The Tories murdered in cold blood a
brother of Patrick Calhoun’s wife. Another
of her brothers fell at Cowpens under thirty sabre-wounds.
Another was taken prisoner and remained for nine months
in close confinement at one of the British Andersonvilles
of that day. Patrick Calhoun, in many a desperate
encounter with the Indians, displayed singular coolness,
courage, adroitness, and tenacity. On one memorable
occasion, thirteen of his neighbors and himself maintained
a forest fight for several hours with a force of Cherokees
ten times their number. When seven of the white